Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK THE decision of the Interstate Commerce Commission to reject the proposed merger of five railways into a new Nickel Plate system, as formed by the Von Sweringen interests, may...
...It may succeed also in linking more effectively the police work of various cities...
...and, finally, in persuading the law-makers themselves that much of the prevailing contempt for statutes may be due, at least relatively, to the absurd and chaotic nature of much legislation...
...and he emerged again with a book as rich and fragrant as a cargo of Arabian spices and Persian wines, singular in its impressionistic vision of a world which many people had mistaken for a province...
...Nevertheless, his paradoxical statement is evidence, all the stronger for the quarter from which it comes, of the perennial human interest contained in the biographies of God's elect...
...Instead, many of the most august senators seemed to feel merely that they were being invited to view samples of dirty linen...
...OCCASIONALLY, of course, the East takes its revenge...
...The persistence of the group of Jesuit scholars, who went on from generation to generation, handing over the fruit of toil and scholarship as the pen dropped from one laborious hand after another, is a positive miracle of persistence...
...If the threat implies a boycott of honest merchants who stock the outlawed goods to meet a demand that is still pretty general, the "freedom" that the ladies of the league append to their title becomes one more of the sarcasms that make the gods weep or smile, as the whim moves them, when contemplating the postwar scene...
...Untoward events interrupted but never stopped the undertaking...
...The old Stamboul dealer might at least lay claim to being a manufacturer of conditions...
...As things stand, the Von Sweringens are invited to form a new plan, which can profit by the stand taken in the commission's hearings...
...1 HE almost simultaneous passing of two great modern English scholars encourages reflection upon the work accomplished by those who are ranked as "late Victorians...
...That American history, no less, can be their debtor, is shown by the recent work of Father Will Whalen, the priest serving the Catholic mission at Ortanna, Pennsylvania, whose interest in Mary Jemison, "the white woman of the Genesee," has attracted fresh attention to one of the most dramatic figures of frontier history, whose life-story, told in extreme old age to Dr...
...But for Sir Sidney Lee, biographer of Shakespeare and of kings, on the other hand, fidelity to traditional minute details was a habit probably dictated by genuine patriotic and domestic affection...
...As is the case with most of the big things in life, the initial design came from one man's brain, though the name of Father Rosweid, a Jesuit priest of the Belgian province, has been lost, while it was his successor, Father Bolland, who saw the first two volumes through the press in 1643 and w^o seems to have been the first to realize truly the immense scale of the work that had been undertaken, whose memory is associated imperishably with the collection...
...Bishop Manning's invitation to the "Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish churches" to go on joint record against the growing evil of divorce, made in his Ash Wednesday sermon, is thoroughly in line with the tendency of the day to see added force in any ethical recommendation when it is made by men who have sunk their disagreements in order to present it...
...The spirit in which the creator of M. Bergeret would have addressed himself to his task, to say nothing of the marginal notes that would have resulted, is something rather less than dubious...
...Seminaries and colleges, which were for a time tolerated, have been robbed, seized, and closed...
...and then we shall see better than we do now the value of modern pilgrimages away from the cramped sufficiency of an island mind...
...jhLPART from this main issue, it is disheartening to see the sordid and sorry experience of Lawrence, Massachusetts, being repeated after thirteen years of comparative peace in the textile industry, during which time neither party to the industrial dispute seems to have learned much or forgotten much...
...But the Chicago pilgrimage stresses a salutary point...
...But it is not too much to hope that those who care to approach the problem of contemporary Mexico with open minds will do themselves the favor of listening to a spokesman so well-informed and so ready to be conciliatory as is Bishop Kelley...
...Observe, for instance, the utter nonchalance with which the purveyors to modern archaeology rifle the tombs of Egyptian kings and transport the august remains to new mausoleums for the surfeit of the curious...
...I HERE is nothing so dead as a dead civilization...
...I HE Passaic strike involves matters of far-reaching industrial significance...
...there are subtle, trifling, but telling manoeuvers of mind...
...and in practice many local criminal cases are finally disposed of by the higher courts or the governor's pardon...
...Those who don't like toys that recall war, one presumes, are boycotting them in the same way they boycott hats, shoes, neckties, or anything else that does not appeal to their taste—and that is by refraining from buying them...
...On the face of it, it is not quite plain how a boycott against any particular article of merchandise can get to work...
...At the same time, it is impossible not to regard, with something approaching indulgence, the additional trial to police temper imported into the disturbed situation by the ubiquity and persistence of camera-men, press and movie alike...
...In short, its report is a testimonial to the increasing value of the Interstate Commerce Commission—a commission which, since its formation, has rendered services of the highest importance to the nation...
...In any case, the task to which they are addressing themselves is one which human nature can safely be left to deal with...
...There is an amazing disregard for alien culture in the whole venture to exploit the past—a disregard which, when one contemplates it realistically, is not merely an offense against charity but also a challenge to anything which can be termed good will among associated peoples...
...Is it because they so rarely control their feelings...
...When all the leagues and societies have had their way, one rather wonders what will be left to high-spirited children during the hours when school doesn't keep and the movie and radio haven't begun...
...and it showed a remarkably thorough grasp of the technical problems involved in modern traffic...
...But such a feeling would only be a faint reflection of their unalterable conviction that its place upon the statute book in any shape or form whatsoever is opposed to moral law...
...There is no excuse for public blindness to a situation which, as good citizens, we ought to know, and as tolerant men, ought to regret...
...WEEK BY WEEK THE decision of the Interstate Commerce Commission to reject the proposed merger of five railways into a new Nickel Plate system, as formed by the Von Sweringen interests, may have added another blow to those recently experienced on the stock exchange, but is unusually farsighted and valuable...
...It is satisfactory to see the Catholic view so well voiced by Monsignor Belford, of Brooklyn, who, in response to a press questionnaire, put his finger upon the difficulty by asking where the exact authority of the Protestant and Jewish bodies to speak definitely upon the subject could be found...
...The commission went on record as approving mergers which will aid in reducing the competition which now so seriously impairs the industrial efficiency of railroading...
...But those who have seen every ceremonial occasion or historic pageant within the past ten years robbed of all elements of solemnity or actuality by the presence of brisk gentlemen in rubber coats, in headlong pursuit of the picturesque, and have been compelled to sacrifice their enjoyment of the real event in order that its representation upon the screen may profit distributing houses, will not be without a sneaking feeling that poetic justice for once overtook the squalid and the vulgar...
...Not all of us could agree to accept Sir Sidney's version of Shakespeare: it sometimes seemed too obsequious, speculative and decorous...
...Granted the right of workers to strike, and granted the right of citizens to parade, fairly freely accorded hitherto to any body conducting itself peaceably, it is not quite clear why a combination of the two should create a special occasion calling for active police aggression, tear-bombs, and motor-cycle charges, at peril to life and limb...
...The difference in the final figure was twenty cents...
...The public will, indeed, gather from the incident a confidence in railway management which can only react favorably towards the aims and methods of the industry...
...The hopeless division upon essentials that a common conference could be trusted to produce is evident from the statement, by Rabbi de SolaPool, that action would have to be aimed at procuring "uniformity in the marriage and divorce laws" of the various states, and that the question is one which "involves citizenship rather than religion...
...It seems extremely pertinent, therefore, that Bishop Francis C. Kelley, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose previous discussion of the Lind era in our relations with Mexico was valuably representative of Catholic feeling, should again come forth to clear the air of erroneous news and false conclusions...
...From what %one knows of the monarch of the poor it is likely that he would have expressed his opinion in something more cutting than a cutting remark...
...Something so like a reflex revolution could not, we acknowledge gratefully, stir the Senate to an eager longing for an immaculate Chicago...
...Yes, unfortunately, we as a people read little early history, and much flagrant journalism...
...White had made his call...
...1 HREE or four centuries later than the western world, the Moslems of Bagdad are tasting of the benefits of social progress, under the British aegis, and it is by no means all jam...
...Red-blooded little boys (and more than one red-blooded little girl) have played at soldiers before a tin soldier was ever molded, and March 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 509 will continue to play at war with wooden swords and paper helmets, if necessary, when the last has been melted down to make a jolly pacific little cash-register...
...ONE of the advantages of a resident clergy that is conceded by persons not at all interested in missionary effort, is that it covers the country with men who are scholars as well as pastors, and inclined by temperament to take a keen interest in local tradition and legend...
...But it was not till 1846 that the first volume of the new series was printed, after a hiatus of forty-two years...
...And so we can profitably take the time to adjudge the interesting progress toward solution made by two sturdy, if basically different, pioneers...
...Neither the much heralded tariff nor the prevailing business optimism have succeeded in lifting from the mill-towns of New Jersey, New England, and elsewhere, the pall of industrial poverty...
...Adopted into the Seneca tribe, she shared their wandering and uprooted life, became the wife of two noted warriors, and died at the advanced age of ninety after resisting every invitation to return to her kinsfolk...
...Quite properly it was felt that the orderly processes of municipal rule ought not to be set awry by the extraordinary mechanics of federal intervention...
...The government has done everything possible to prohibit Catholic education and now its spokesman turns about and cries: 'You did not educate the people.' Let Americans read the early history of Mexico and see what the Church did for education before the hand of the oppressor and exploiter was laid on her, I need only mention that the first university established in North America was founded in Mexico by the Church...
...One wonders what Haroun-al-Raschid would have to say about the Anglo-Mohammedan snob...
...A still heavier one came with the French Revolution and the invasion of Belgium, when the collected material of many years was swept away...
...Some of these last are ironical enough to be memorable...
...At all events, the effort to rouse crowds to rage might, if it were sensibly expended, draw public attention to what is really the important matter—not suffering workers on the march, but a crippled and quivering industry which needs rescue...
...ONE would like to know a little more about the status and purpose of the Women's International League for Peace arid Freedom, which purposes to kill the war spirit by "boycotting" drums, toy swords, and tin soldiers...
...The story of the Bollandists is in itself a romance of the most authentic quality...
...It indicates that public opinion, while somewhat timid about the practical details of transportation consolidation, is strongly in favor of it providing fundamental principles of business honesty are not violated...
...When one considers the additional fact that a continuous series of supplements are necessitated by the new canonizations, and that unsuspected sources of information are coming to light daily, it does not seem an unlikely prospect that centuries hence, Bollandists unborn will be writing the record of God's saints for the edification of a world that is not infrequently led to piety by the circuitous way of its intellectual curiosity...
...If it does, we should be told of it, and the duty of the worker to remain in his house when he is not profitably busy in someone else's factory, clearly laid down...
...That troublesome and occasional unsanitary person, the poor brother in the faith, is being taught that a respectful distance between classes is of the essence of progress...
...1 HE spectacle of a good man getting all the fun out of life that a bad one, notoriously, manages to exMarch 17, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL tract, is always pleasing...
...The lesson was probably of distinct value, if one is to judge by the previous antics and programs of the association...
...Everything in the life of umad Jack Howard" is portentous...
...The rights of the public who enjoy their news in pictures might well be drawn a little to the hither side of enterprise that ensures the pictures shall be of the knock-down-and-drag-out stuff of "reel life...
...A quiet country squire till the age of forty-six, a chance experience as sheriff of how hardly law pressed upon the poor and unfriended sent him wandering over Europe, pestering gaolers and quarantine wardens for admission into their gloomy hells-on-earth—quite ready, when persuasion failed, to take any method of arousing suspicion, short of law-breaking, to secure inside knowledge on the best and most practical basis, and rounding his mission with an untimely death in fever-stricken Kherson...
...It is still our problem—nor have we mastered it...
...Therefore, the resolve of Governor Smith to seek the establishment of a New York State commission for the study of crime and its prevention has attracted wide attention and seems assured of support in the legislature...
...A rather pathetic communication to the Manchester Guardian notes some of the changes that have overtaken life in the city of the Thousand and One Nights, where a better time for fewer people is in full course of replacing the "mediaeval form of socialistic society [the writer must mean communistic] which still existed in Bagdad before the war...
...An attractive, if not a majestic, illustration may be seen in the experience which Victor Murdock, returning 5io THE COMMONWEAL March 17, 1926 from Constantinople, narrated for the delight of his fellow-citizens...
...That Catholics would welcome any tightening of the divorce law is, of course, true...
...It is a queer circumstance that the amateur sociologists who invariably flock, as may be learned from Passaic, to the scene of labor wars with their oratory and their gestures, so seldom devote a thought to general economic law...
...jDY carrying the business of crime to the Senate, the Chicago Better Government Association succeeded in little beyond making itself ridiculous...
...Hence the appearance of a sixty-fifth volume of the great work is a literary and historical event of prime importance...
...It is an interesting comment on the strange Indian character that Mary admitted kind and tender treatment from her warrior husbands—though both were braves noted for ferocity in war...
...Father Whalen's interest in this strange footnote to frontier history has not only taken the practical form of a statue to her memory, erected on the spot where she was captured, about a mile from his church, and with money raised by him through lectures upon her story, but also the writing of an historical novel, The Golden Squaw, which has recently been published...
...It is not at all likely that 508 THE COMMONWEAL March 17, 1926 aesthetic considerations nerved the arm that roughly distributed the component parts of an "Akely motion picture model, valued at $2,500...
...Nobody—unless one except a few eccentrics like Wilfrid Scawen Blunt—seems to have reflected that such grave-robbing might be considered objectionable by the survivors of Egypt's glory...
...There are brutal and devastating rebellions against the conquerors' gunpowder...
...They evidence this weakness each time their good intentions are subjected to the acid test of attempted cooperation with the one body which regards compromise in this vital matter as impossible and unthinkable...
...MARY JEMISON, concerning whom Father Whalen admits he knew nothing before coming to the mission, was captured as a child by the Indians during one of the sporadic raids that marked the final phase of the war between England and France for the possession of America...
...The peace of a commonwealth is closely bound up with the peace of a community...
...A good hearty game at "boycott" might not be a bad idea...
...Sometime these wonder-loving voyages into eastern days and nights will have a section of literature all their own...
...and it will probably remain true that every discussion of Stratford and its bard will at least begin with a bow to Sir Sidney's record...
...impressions of the religious situation in Mexico must be, above all, honest...
...It is a pity that some of our historians of the new school whose interest in Casanova, Cagliostro, Don Juan Tenorio, and rascaldom generally is keeping the publishing press busy, do not turn their attention to John Howard, whose bicentenary (through sheer failure to identify the exact day of his birth) was celebrated in England three weeks ago...
...Nor did it exceed its authority in pointing out that the indifference to minority holdings shown by those who outlined the new Nickel Plate merger could not be sponsored by the government...
...To the credit of Napoleon it must be recorded that he realized the value of the work and sought to have it continued under imperial auspices...
...Napoleon remarked that he made circumstances...
...James E. Seaver, was favorite reading with the generation just before the Civil War...
...1 HERE is always an apparent plausibility in invitations for a "common platform" upon social and moral problems, from whatever religious quarter they proceed...
...In speaking to a Brooklyn audience, Bishop Kelley dealt with the fundamental issues in the explanatory letter which the Mexican minister, Tepada, had seen fit to address to the American press...
...If this irregularity had been permitted to go unnoticed, the whole future of railroad reorganization would have been under suspicion...
...Dealing with the fundamental problem of Mexican education, Bishop Kelley declared: "The Catholic Church has been forbidden by law for more than sixty years to conduct schools...
...But the price remained the same— with the difference of interest computed from the day when Mr...
...The venerable dealer had preserved the trophies well enough, divining in his heart that the gentleman from Kansas would be haunted by them in his dreams...
...Pledged as it was to the one psychological principle of capital punishment as a preventive, its logical goal was little different from the erection of an ornate necklace of gallows encircling the city for the instruction and consternation of the morally weak...
...In the first place, it is a protest against poverty and unemployment which cannot be settled locally...
...Some idea of the magnitude of the task upon which the house at Brussels is engaged may be gathered from the fact that the present volume covers only the dates, November 9 and 10...
...By their surrender to the authority of the state in the matter of marriage, religious bodies outside the Church have merely weakened their power to control what even they regard as its abuse...
...Such a commission as the one proposed can at least try to correlate the action of these various agencies...
...IT is interesting to recall as showing the way in which human foresight is often superseded by events, that the original schedule called for completion in eighteen volumes, and that it is 122 years ago since the fiftythird volume saw the light...
...The suppression of the order in 1773 was one great blow...
...The old-time greetings once exchanged between high and low are becoming an unseemly anachronism, thrown as they now are at the windows of an automobile speeding through the bazaar at thirty miles an hour...
...But the tireless fidelity of his dogged scholarship has been matched by no other enquirer into the theme...
...He had turned aside from the main route of his voyage for the purpose of buying a pair of candlesticks which his friend, William Allen White, had coveted to the extent of haggling over them for two hours...
...BOTH the crime and the desire to check it have uncovered forms of law-breaking which call for a united civic opposition...
...Charles M. Doughty was one of the masters who—like the almost equally individual Sir Richard Burton—assumed the task of answering the modern British imperial summons to scholarship...
...Nevertheless, the contemplation of such lonely and dedicated figures as Howard, "self-centered, selfsecure," whose field was the world and who were their own field-secretaries, remains an inspiration in these days of reports, committees, and resolutions, when the amount of honey produced is too often in disappointing proportion to the size of the swarm...
...The history of organized charity is a noble one, and under the anonymity of its corporateness, many an obscure Howard has worked and died a martyr to his (or her) enthusiasm for mercy and righteousness...
...Should not our possibly helpless descendants resent, as do many of the subject Orientals, the sinister and dictatorial robbery of shrines...
...This procedure is eminently fair and above board...
...in subjecting to a more enlightened scrutiny the conduct of parole boards and similar agencies in controlling effectively the duties of the state police...
...He studied Shakespeare as a devoted gardener studies his plot of ground...
...One may say, mingling the remembrance of the two men just dead, that they illustrate the problem which was preeminently that of the late Victorian mind—the baffling problem of welding the new and yet uncharted world with the quiet sanctities of home...
...At Passaic, the attitude of the authorities, like that of the haughty patricians in the first act of Julius Caesar, seems to have been to regard any public evidence of idle hands during a strike as a gesture of revolt: "Know you not, being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a labouring day without the sign Of your profession...
...He went into the desert, into the Orient, into mystery...
...It gives us a peculiar start to realize that during some century to come, wealthy collectors from somewhere in the antipodes may carry off the bones of Lincoln or the tombstone of Alexander Hamilton, for the instruction of brown-skinned little boys and girls...
...The issue is that of textile manufacturing in the United States generally—of the steady depression and sluggish markets which during the past year have pushed certain companies out of business, and for which the government agencies for the promotion of commerce have failed to secure relief...
...In a word, the old-fashioned idea that all Moslems, rich or poor, are brothers, "simply doesn't work...
...The "modern, sprucelydressed cabinet minister" hates to be annoyed by him, and is not only keeping secretaries whose business is to ask him his business, but refusing to see him at all...
...ANATOLE FRANCE is reported to have once said that, were he condemned to solitary confinement for life, and allowed to take but one printed work into his prison, he would select the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum...
...How immensely indebted history is to the research work of these annalists "on the spot," is fully realized in Europe—indeed, much of the salvaging of tradition that has taken place in the past hundred years is recognized as standing to their credit...
...The party boycotted will not need the adventitious aid of drums and swords to turn it into a worth-while affair...
...On the face of it, the violence of the police at Passaic, on which all press correspondents agree, seems unwarranted, and the inference that pressure on their services has resulted in their losing their good judgment is inescapable...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 19
